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So it’s that time of year again where conspicuous consumption, The United State’s favorite pastime, goes into overdrive. Here at the CFC, we’d like to counter the external pressure to buy the latest expensive gadget that will be obsolete by the next manufactured buying push, by suggesting you gift differently. Last year, CF Crunkista got this tradition off to an excellent start and we are building on that work this year. Basically, boo capitalism but if you are going to spend, here are some awesome products, people, and projects to support this holiday season.

Products

The soon to be released, The Summer We Got Free by Black Girl Dangerous Mia Mckenzie is some of the best fiction out there. If you are able to read this book, you should and so should everyone you know! The kind of seeds this will plant in minds will be the most delicious of strange fruit!

If you just have to have an e-reader, get a Kobo and support independent bookstores in the process. They’re the only e-reader that promises not to share your secret copy of 50 Shades of Grey with the Feds.

A toy that encourages little girls to be engineers. :o) Goldieblocks…yes, I know “goldie” but its an awesome idea. For a less whitewashed toy try Roominate, created by three women (1.5 of color) engineers designed to help spark girls’ interests in STEM.

Your favorite childhood book– the actual print version from your childhood that you find at a used bookstore or online.

A nineties-celebrity-turned-ordinary-citizen autograph. Last I heard, Devoe was selling real estate in Atlanta. Surely he would sign a shirt for Moya for $20 (please!!!). Also, I know some people who know some people who know the members of The Boys (Dial my Heart). And if you want to get CF Crunkonia a gift, please track down at least one of the girls from Visions (Ooh La La) and get them to sign something.

More Music ideas – For music to gift, buy music from some great indie (self-distributed artists):

Support a local person who knows how to do something. Even if this person isn’t marketing their services, pay them to give you and your friends a workshop. For instance, get one of your best dancer friends to teach a session on twerkin. Do you have a spoken word artist in your kinship circle? Get them to teach the tools of spoken word that may just help you in your daily tasks. Do your own Shawty Got Skillz Share or invite the shawties to teach you something!

Are you trying to understand your life and the reason you keep encountering different versions of the same person over and over again? Raising a little one and want to adapt your parenting to fit their emotional needs? Give the gift of an astrological reading by the one and only Yolo Akili.

Do you know a desperate graduate student or organization that needs some editing post haste? Buy them some editing hours from Summer McDonald.

Projects

set up a debt strike cooperative with friends and family- We were geeked when we heard about the strike debt campaign and we still are excited about it’s potential though a bit more curious about all its various implications. Think about starting a debt coop or innovative money collaborative with friends and family!

A role playing session in which you play the role of a person your friend needs to ask for forgiveness and or make amends with. You can help your friend talk through the language of apology.

A self made coupon book with coupons like:

2 Regular Helping Hands Sessions and 1 Pre- or- post gathering Helping Hands Session. A helping hands session is when one of your friends comes over to do what you would pay someone to do if you could, only they don’t judge you under their breath. Helping hands sessions are best when there is more than one friend coming over.

2 Two Strand Twist Sets. Two strand twists: anyone can do them, but few people want to do it for free because face it, heads are big.

Closet Clean Out Day and/ or Clothes Swap. Watch an episode of Clean Sweep (the TLC show that predated Clean House) on youtube and apply the rules to your friend’s messiest closet.

Babysitting, babysitting, babysitting…

Day’o’movies… And not just on the weekend. Choose a day that you will both (or all) deliberately take off of work and watch movies all day. You don’t even have to shower.

V(Ex) Day- On one of the Hallmark Holidays that shall go unmentioned, have a day of heart cleansing for your friends who still pine over exes. Create a ceremony in which you release the memories to the past and embrace the people you are in the present. Ask forgiveness. Grant forgiveness. Catalog, throw away and digitize old couples pictures. Put in the universe what you’d like in partners, lovers or friends in the future. Figure out what it is that your friends want from romantic partners that you can do (someone to talk to on the regular, someone who takes out the trash, someone to help with the kids, someone to help with household chores, etc.)

Help FUND The Black Girl Project They had an unsuccessful funding cycle on Kickstarter. We can still help this organization. If you work with women and girls, teach on these subjects, or know someone who does, you might want to gift them: – a DVD from the Black Girl Project: http://blackgirlproject.org/film/ – a shirt from their merch store: http://skreened.com/thebgp

13 Responses to “CFC’s Favorite Things: Crunk Holiday Gifts”

http://www.punjammies.com/pages/the-story-of-punjammies “PUNJAMMIES™ are created in after-care facilities for women who have been rescued, released or escaped from a life of forced prostitution. Their lives have been marked by a message – you are a commodity – to be used for others’ gain. Whether sold by her own family, trafficked from another country or driven by desperation, she was a slave to this life. Each story is as unique as each woman.”

2.) Support the Ali Forney Center in NYC. It was destroyed during Hurricane Sandy, but thanks to donors will now be able to rebuild. The center provides shelter for homeless LGBTQ youth, and is named for a transwoman murdered in NYC in the late 1990s.

3.) Buy a friend a used copy of a favorite book from childhood. Crunkonia knows how much I loved the Baby-Sitters Club as a kid. She found a copy of an old book from the series, wrote me a sweet note inside and sent it to me. It’s one of the most thoughtful gifts I’ve received in a while.

I work at at a group home for young girls with minimal and dysfunctional family support. I want to make them care packages and have them shipped to them on Christmas Eve as from Santa. I have been struggling with deciding on what to put in their packages, and you’ve given me so many fabulous ideas. They need some positive influence on their life, and I think giving them things that will impact their life is essential. This is a fantastic post, and I hope more people decide to give gifts like these. Thanks for the information and inspiration. Some young ladies’ lives may be changed as a result.

This response made me think of a lovely article I just read by Thea Lim on the linguistics of describing mixed race people (as halves, etc). I loved it because it vocalized some of the things I’ve thought about when deciding how to describe my mixed heritage to people, while respecting the idea that we should describe our selves as we please. Find it here: http://www.thealim.org/?p=89

How about donating money to Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project (QWOCMAP) so that another queer woman of color, gender nonconforming or transgender person of color can take a FREE filmmaking workshop. Workshops like this cost between $2,000-$5,000 and QWOCMAP, a social justice feminist, queer-led, immigrant-founded, artist-run organization offers them for FREE. It costs QWOCMAP $500 per partipant to offer the workshops. It’s a gift that keeps giving, through the transformative process of creating a film, watching a film with people that look like you, and talking about the films with your friends and family. If you can’t give $500, even $5, $10 or $25 will pay for a mess of mini-dv tapes, and that is someone’s film.